


owners and occupants of earlier dates (from graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands)

by NotAFicWriter



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, F/M, percy basically lives in the winchester mystery house, trinket is a ghost hunting dog this is very important to me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 23:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21127058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotAFicWriter/pseuds/NotAFicWriter
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a haunted man in possession of an even more haunted house must be in want of a paranormal investigator.





	owners and occupants of earlier dates (from graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LeanMeanSaltineMachine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeanMeanSaltineMachine/gifts).

> hey! this is my fill for leanmeansaltinemachine's request for the perc'ahlia month gift exchange. they requested a paranormal investigators au, and hopefully i managed a good mix of spooky and lighthearted. hey, lee! i hope it's to your liking! as always, thank you very, very much to ladyofrosefire for the immense help with the fic, and sorry for the slight delay in submitting this. title is from henry wadsworth longfellow's "haunted houses".

“Sorry in advance for this,” Keyleth says, playing with the knobs of the ghost box sheepishly, “I hate it, too.”

Vex stands near where Percy is sitting, trying not to shift the camera too much. “Is Melanie de Rolo particularly talkative?”

“About as talkative as any ghost, I’d imag -” Percy starts, flinching when Keyleth flicks on the radio receiver. The scanning feature flits through channels, creating a hissing, white noise drum of voice snippets, each only a split-second in length.

Vex hates the ghost box. Frankly, most of them do, especially Keyleth, who’s as jumpy on most investigations as she is determined to get results by any means. On a particularly harrowing venture into a supposedly-haunted old ward, Vex saw her scream at Vax’s flashlight going out, immediately following her running down a shadowy figure through a lengthy hallway, as silent as the night. It of course turned out that the shadow figure in question  _ was,  _ in fact, Vax himself, running at full tilt due to being pursued by an unseen 6-foot-tall assailant, but that needs no explanation.

Through the hiss of channels switching in fractions of a second, Vex tries to pick out individual words. She hears what might be a drumbeat, and maybe a twang of a guitar, here and there, somebody’s high note clipped, and a drone of late night radio, but she’s very perceptive, and these clips don’t come together to make a pattern.

“Can you hear me?” Keyleth asks. She’s always very mechanical during these sort of things, as their comment section is quick to latch onto whenever they upload an investigation. “My name is Keyleth, what’s your name?”

Vax waits maybe thirty seconds, passing his butterfly knife from hand to hand anxiously before cutting in. He says, “Hey! De Rolo! Is this your house or what?!” In the same exact tone of voice he uses to needle Percy during prolonged editing sessions.

“Of course it’s her house,” Percy says, scoffing. “We’re not in the Melanie de Rolo House because it was built by the request of strangers and carousers.”

Vax, flippantly, offers up a middle finger in his direction. Vex makes sure to get it on camera.

“Maybe she just needs the right encouragement, darling,” Vex says, trying to smooth things over. Believe it or not, this is the best Vax and Percy have gotten along on an investigation in months, and she isn’t liable to let them start to pick open wounds that are finally crusting over. “Tell me, Madame de Rolo, if you’re listening, how did you die?”

The ghost box does not produce words - which, of course it doesn’t, it’s a malformed radio at best, and Vex’s least favorite part of any field work, regardless of the views it gets, or how well she plays the part of speaker - but it does gather up a hiss, as it skips, louder than average. There’s a dry crackle in the background that would only make sense as radio error, the machine itself breaking, but it sounds, to her ear, like the crackling of tinder exploding in a campfire.

She fumbles the camera a bit, feeling the hair on the back of her neck raise high, and at her feet, Trinket builds up a growl in his throat. No-one but them and maybe Keyleth could maybe confirm it, but she swears she can feel a sixth body in the room breathing.

. . .

It’s rare for Percy to even come on investigations with them, much less offer a topic himself.

Percy’s never quite comfortable in front of a camera, you see. If Vex is along is rib him, pinch his side and whisper dirty jokes in his ear half the time, he loosens up enough to play along with the loose script and won’t freeze up too badly when it’s time to improvise, but he doesn’t know how to play up to an audience. She remembers him when they finally read his family’s will, after years of mismanagement and counterfeits, everybody looking at him from all angles, and his mask coming up. She loves him dearly, but he doesn’t have the talent of putting a mask on while letting the audience think they’re seeing one come off. It’s an art. It’s why she gets paid the big bucks.

So he comes along occasionally, but most often he’s behind the camera when he does, or suspending a boom mic in uncomfortable places. If anything he says gets picked up by the audio, it’s an especially cutting response to antic, which Vex is half-sure he only does these days to try to get her to corpse on-screen and ruin the take. The other half of the time, he’s doing research with Keyleth, or working the editing. They need a judicious eye the judge the footage carefully, and there are none more judicious than the one person in their team who decidedly does not believe in the existence of ghosts.

Which, of course, only makes it more worrying when he marches up to Vex and Vax’s apartment (the unofficial base of operations) one morning, and says, before she can talk him into staying for breakfast, “If I ask you to come investigate my family’s house, will you agree without asking too many provoking questions?”

“That depends on what you might define as a provoking question,” Vex says, dipping her index finger in the yet-unstirred cream she’d just poured into her coffee and reaching to dot it on the tip of his nose. He startles back and wipes it off, appearing a great deal more awake.

“Thanks for that,” he says, rubbing his face. He doesn’t look like he’s been sleeping particularly well, or at the very least, worse than he normally already sleeps, with rings around his eyes where he’s scrubbed at them with his hands, and dirty hair. There’s a stubble forming, but there’s always a stubble forming on him. Vex makes to pour him a cup as well, and he gratefully takes it black, grimacing when she finishes pouring and hands it back to him, finding his mug in the cabinet where she usually keeps it.

“Morning, Percival,” Vax says, “you look like shit”. He’s one to talk, of course, having stayed up late last night looking into potential leads at a haunted bar, which ended with him spending the night with Gilmore, as it always does, and creeping back at some ungodly hour of the night, waking up Trinket and her in the process.

“Take a seat, dear,” Vex coaxes, popping another couple of slices of bread into the toaster for him.

It takes another couple of sips of coffee, and a bite or two to eat before Percy begins to explain himself. “Believe me,” he says, “this is as painful for me to say as it sounds, but I believe that my house, uh…  _ may or may not  _ have some supernatural forces governing it.”

“Which house would this be?” Vex asks, which is, she thinks, a response more measured than Vax’s triumphant bark of laughter. It’s an important question, after all, because Percy de Rolo is very old money. Filthy old money. The kind of old money that has him inheriting half a town’s worth of households, titles, and employees at twenty-three, and has them crediting him in every video under a pseudonym so that he doesn’t get harassed about his family’s firearm empire.

“The new estate,” Percy says, ignoring Vax. “Which is to say, the non-ancient estate. The mystery house.”

Vax suddenly loses all humor when he repeats, “The mystery house,” almost reverently. He has that twinkle of inspiration in his eye, which Vex knows all too well from following him into every supposedly-haunted building this side of the Cliffkeep Mountains since they were fourteen. The De Rolo Mystery House is not entirely famous, per se, only a handful of people know about it, but it is exactly the sort of place they could happily spend the next several years exploring every square inch of.

Percy says, “Yes. That house.” He says it like he knew for a fact that this would be what won them over, and he isn’t especially pleased about it. “It’s the latest property that we managed to get ahold of, and I spent a couple nights in it, for the sake of looking it over to see if we ought to keep it in the family or open it to the public. It’s a historic building, after all, and it’s in relative good shape. But there’s something  _ in it,  _ and I’m, ah. I’m not  _ comfortable  _ with letting anyone in before it’s been…”

“Investigated?” Vex says.

“Documented?” Vax says.

“Explored,” Percy says. “Before it’s been explored. There are many rooms, and they don’t all seem to go where they’re supposed to.”

The truth is, Vex would have gone even if it the Melanie de Rolo House wasn't such an inviting thread to pull on. Percy hasn’t been in the best of spots, even if he was doing better since they put the whole Ripley situation to rest months ago, and in his dark moments, he is paranoid and desolate. The last year of his life has been dedicated to repossessing de Rolo properties after they’d been seized by competition through forgery and blackmail, a long time prior, and quietly dismantling the entire de Rolo enterprise, which had been built, for the last two hundred and fifty years, on the designing, production, and sale of firearms.

It was guilty work, and it was weighing heavy on him. Anyone could see.

And so, she puts her hand down over Percy’s, and she smiles. The tension in his shoulders relaxes. “Don’t you worry, darling,” she says. “We are  _ so  _ getting involved in this.”

. . .

The Melanie de Rolo House was, aptly, built by Melanie de Rolo, the first and last of her name. She isn’t Percy’s direct ancestor, but a line closely tied to his, and she built, to her name, a very large, very magnificent house. From the outside, it’s a Victorian era home, hanging between Gothic and quaint in the Stick-style fashion it boasts for itself. It is Romanesque, it is Tal'dorein, the facades are asymmetrical, the porches are pedimented, and the windows strictly oriel. There are more gables and dentils than you can shake a stick at. When they come in through the front entrance, the grass is all dried up for winter, with the hardy variety not yet grown-in, but there is a front garden with a wooden fence around it so perfect, Vex can hardly stand it.

If it weren’t for the ghost problem, Vex would kill to live here. She imagines, of course, that people already have, which would probably be the cause of the ghost problem.

Keyleth points the camera at the entrance enthusiastically, swinging it round with great gusto in an attempt to capture the full breadth and span of such a sprawling house. It’s almost too big for the eye to comprehend, the walls carrying on so long that Vex strains her eyes to see where the porch wraps around. Percy unlocks the doors and gestures them inside, with a sweep of the arm.

“Please, get inside,” he says. “There’s very little in the way of heating, and none of you are used to Whitestone weather.”

“Worrywort,” Vex accuses. “Keyleth, get the gables.”

“I’m getting the gables,” Keyleth says, zooming in on the fine detailing of the roof before Percy closes the doors on them. “It is gable city over here.”

Percy, in his element, is being even more the perfect gentleman, offering to take their coats at the door and adopting a somehow more stuck-up accent than usual. This place suits him, and if he wasn’t so on edge that she can see the finery splinting under his mask, it would flatter him. He offers Vex the crook of his elbow on impulse, and she takes it, folding her arm in his and letting him lead her around the house. He’s never begrudged her for her coping mechanism, and she certainly won’t judge him for his.

He takes them to a long, open hallway, with portraits lining the wall. Not a lot of them, to Vex’s surprise. Not a lot of De Rolos, all in all, have lived in this house, and the few portraits that remain are spaced out in unsettling distance from one another, the spacing inconsistent. At the very end, there’s a painting of a woman in her early thirties, maybe, who doesn’t look very much like Percy, but has his prominent nose and strong brow. Technically beside her, but some distance away, is a man who looks nothing like Percy at all, with very dark hair and unruly mutton chops.

“That,” Percy says, gesturing to the woman, “is the eponymous Melanie de Rolo herself. And that there is her husband, Wolf.”

“Hi,” Keyleth says, moving the camera to one hand so she can wave.

“A very severe couple,” Vex says.

“Yes, very. It was a political marriage. They had two stillborn children, and that was enough for the family not to demand more of them, and by then, my branch was well-established enough that the pressure was no longer on them. They lived more or less alone in this house. Wolf had a number of dalliances that Melanie allowed him in exchange for keeping his nose out of her work, and after six years, he was dead.”

Vax hums. “How mysterious would you say his death was?”

“Well, hardly,” Percy says, “she put atropine in his tea, so. Fairly cut and dry. It took authorities a long time to suspect her, though, she maintained a low profile for long enough to at least start building on the foundation of this house. The entryway is more or less the same as it was when the house was originally built, but as soon as she was left to her own devices to renovate it to her heart’s content, it started becoming… strange.”

He isn’t talking to the camera at all when he’s speaking, which is a poor habit Vex will have to excuse for how haggard he looks, and the fact that he’s in front of the lense and still coherent and relatively composed. He leads them, still holding Vex by the arm, to the set of doors down at the end of the hall, where one can tell, by the changing of the wood and style, the house had been changed after the construction of the foundation. He counts the doors, landing on the third, which he gestures to, and opens to reveal an open pit, which goes right down to the basement.

“That’s the first thing I noticed,” he says. “The flooring didn’t rot, it’s not a gap for an elevator shaft to be installed later, this doorway was simply built to accommodate a pit.”

Vax looks down the pit with a measuring glance, fishing out a flashlight from his pocket and pointing it straight down the hatch. He asks, “What are the dimensions of this thing?”

“Four feet by four feet exactly,” Percy answers. “I haven’t climbed down to measure how far it goes.”

“And there’s nothing on the bottom? No spike traps, no gelatinous cubes, no thing-that-looks-like-a-treasure-chest-with-teeth?”

“I don’t know,” Percy says, shrugging. “Like I said, I’ve never gone down to the basement through here. Just through the stairwell, like a normal, well-reared person. You’re familiar with those, aren’t you?”

“Ehh, I’m not overly fond of them,” Vax says. “Only one way to find out, then.” He stuffs the end of the flashlight in his mouth to keep the light ahead of him, and, gesturing to Keyleth to follow, sets to climbing down.

“How am I supposed to hold the camera and follow?” she wonders aloud.

“Here,” Percy says, taking it. “Use your action camera, I’ll hold this one to film you going down.”

“Aren’t you coming along?”

“ _ No. I’m  _ going to go down to the basement without breaking my ankle again, so that at least one of us is functional enough at the end of this romp to drive us all to the hospital.”

“I said I’m sorry about that!” Keyleth snaps, blushing furiously. “Alright, you do you. I’m going to come down.”

“Sorry, darling,” Vex says, “I really would, but I should go bring Trinket in from the yard. We might need him for this one.”

“You kids run along,” Percy confirms. “We’ll get take care of the ghost dog that’s keeping our business afloat.”

Keyleth, who’s already dangling her feet down into the pit and starting on scooting down by finding one handhold in the brick and exposed timber after the other, waves them goodbye, and Percy records her doing so. “Suit yourselves,” she says, disappearing beneath, her voice echoing. “Don’t die!”

Percy turns the camera off as soon as the two of them disappear from sight down into the basement. “I figure we’ll probably have voice over for this part,” he says. “Explaining the history of the house in more detail. What year it was built, the people designing it, some more about the De Rolo Rifle Company.”

“Percival,” Vex says, redirecting his attention. “What really had you bringing us here? Don’t get me wrong, this is a fascinating place, but I know you, and I doubt you’d be so enthralled as to being us to investigate your house unless you were very,  _ very  _ troubled by something here. Tell me?”

Percy looks at her. Really looks at her, with his sunken eyes, like he did the night before they found him, wilted in a holding cell, and he’d just been informed she paid his bail. “You really are my favorite, you know,” he says, a little ponderingly. “How long do you think the basement will have them occupied?”

“Long enough,” she says.

“Good.” He turns to leave, flicking the camera back on and taking long strides towards the backyard. “We should have enough time to look at the garden, then.”

. . .

Percy has her hold Trinket back by the harness when they’re entering through the garden’s main, wrought-iron gate, and she suspects it isn’t because he wants to protect the plants within.

Trinket comes along whenever a place they’re investigating allows dogs, and at least on one occasion, places they’re investigating that don’t allow dogs. Mostly, Vex brings him along because he’s her very good boy and she loves him, and because he gets lonely at home, but having him along does also have the unintended benefit of differentiating them from the rest of the Tal'dorei-based paranormal investigation groups. Because they had a very large black dog with them, and sometimes, he wears goggles, because they were very cute, and to protect his eyes from debris in old buildings.

Percy unlocks the gate to the garden with a heavy-looking key he takes out of the dirt in one of the flowerbeds. He looks conspiratorial as he does so, the fancy airs he put on when they entered the house all but gone now, and now he only looks tired and high-strung. “You know I don’t believe in ghosts,” he says, all conversational.

Vex fumbles with the camera. It’s recording, but she intends to remove the audio in editing. She has it pointed slightly away from them, not wanting to corner him with the lense again. There’s a private atmosphere to this, something weighty building up ahead of them, and she doesn’t want to intrude. She says, “And you know I don’t entirely either.”

“But you do believe somewhat?”

“I believe in  _ something, _ ” Vex confirms. “I’ve seen  _ some things _ before, Percy. During investigations, rarely, and before we started working this kind of scene.” She saw, once, a shadow on a house, moving from burnt roof to smoldering ruin, when they’d visited the wreckage of their hometown, which had burned three days before it could be extinguished. Coal fires from coal towns last a very long time and are hard to pinpoint the start of. “I don’t know if those things were ghosts, but they were there.”

“Well,” Percy says, in the choked-off way that he does. “Uh. A very similar thing happened  _ here _ , more or less. A little further in, actually; this is the outer garden, but if we keep walking, we’ll be in Melanie de Rolo’s poison garden.”

“Oh,” Vex says, holding Trinket’s harness a little tighter, “is that so?”

Instead of answering, Percy just keeps marching forward, wearing a distant, troubled look. She doesn’t need him to explain, after all - as soon as they move past the shrubbery, and common garden species, she makes out stable colonies of foxglove and monkshood, patches of belladonna, made delicate by the winter. There’s other plants she doesn’t recognize, some with menacing appearances, but most fairly innocuous to the inexperienced eye. She only really knows what is and isn’t safe to touch when you’re in the forest, but she really wants to bring Keyleth down to look at the more exotic plants here, out of curiosity.

At the center of the garden, where Percy leads, there’s a neat little table for tea, built nearby a yew tree. He stands near it, palms out, like he’s waiting for something. He doesn’t say anything at first, just watches the tree, and the table, and looks tired.

“Percy, dear. Have you been taking care of yourself?”

“I’ve been sleeping,” he says, defensively. “I’ve been resting, and going to therapy, and everything we’ve thoroughly outlined before. And I saw something here, just a few days ago.”

“What happened here?”

He says, “When they found out about the real cause of Wolf’s death, some years afterwards, this is where she was waiting. In the time after, two more people died from atropine poisoning, and by then, people were starting to suspect her. When they found her here, the mob dragged her out of the garden and had her hanged.”

Vex eyes the yew tree. It doesn’t look broad enough to support that.

“No,” Percy says, sensing her line of thought, “not here. There’s a larger tree at the center of the town, they used that. But they found her here.”

Trinket whines, tugging against Vex’s grip and trying to back up. His ears are pinned back, and the long hairs along his ruff beginning to rise on end. “Maybe we should get back inside.”

Percy nods. “Maybe. It’s starting to get cold, after all.”

Vex reviews the footage on the way back into the house, looking it over and over again. There’s nothing on the table, or near the tree, but when the camera is pointed slightly off to the side of Percy, she can see something indistinct in the frame. It’s only a blip in the footage, nothing more than a disturbance, but she watches it carefully, and it looks very nearly like smoke rising up from a candle.

On the way back, her hand brushes against Percy’s, and he startles visibly, like he forgot she was there.

. . .

With a sigh, Keyleth flicks the knob of the ghost box to silent. “Nothing to say, I guess. Bye, ghosts.”

“Bye, ghosts,” Vax says.

“Bye,” Vex repeats.

Percy doesn’t say anything. His hand is stroking Trinket’s head, mechanically.

They ended up, as Percy originally said, joining Vax and Keyleth in the basement through the stairwell, which descended down into the depths of the round in a tight circle. It’s turned the opposite way one expects, so that one’s left hand is to the center beam rather than the right, coming down, and it has an uncanny effect. It’s more comfortable for left-handed folks like Vex, and, supposedly, Melanie de Rolo herself, but the strangeness of expecting it to be mirrored puts her on edge, always half-expecting to trip down when descending.

As for the basement itself, it’s not as eerie as she expected it to be. It’s oddly cozy, and safe-feeling.

“This was Melanie’s study, once,” Percy had told them when they began, trying to find a good place to start up the ghost box. “She had a laboratory here, for distilling substances. The more dangerous materials have long since been removed, and the lab itself renovated, but this would be where she spent much of her time, studying and putting her research to letter.”

“We should probably go to sleep soon,” Keyleth suggests. They’d decided, as was their normal investigation style, to sleep at least one night in the house itself, since so much phenomena takes place overnight. “Split off into pairs again, or should we all pack in into one bedroom?”

“Wolf and Melanie had separate bedrooms,” Percy says. “You and I take Wolf’s, and Vex and Vax share Melanie’s?”

Vax wrinkles his nose, displeased. “Why are we getting the haunted room?”

Percy says, in a slow monotone, “Why do you think that Melanie is the one haunting this house?”

Vax opens his mouth, defensive, but no words come to him, and he closes his mouth, a little put out.

“Percy, no offense,” Keyleth says, “but you talk in your sleep, and it is  _ horrifying.  _ Last time we shared a room, you started talking about gun maintenance, and I couldn’t sleep until you quieted down. Maybe you share with Vax, and I’ll go with Vex?”

Vax looks at Percy with unabashed disdain. “That’s not going to happen,” he says.

There are things Vax doesn’t forgive, much as Vex would very much like him to, by now.

“I’ll shake Melanie’s room with Percy,” she intervenes, in a tone that brooks no argument, “Vax, Keyleth - you go sleep in Wolf’s.”

They have two night cameras, which were very expensive, that they set up in the corners of rooms they pick out to sleep in, to monitor any activity while they’re sleeping, which has come in very handy before. There is, of course, only the one bed in the middle of the room, not pressed against any of the four walls, and Vex isn’t really sure what she expected.

“You take the bed,” Percy offers up immediately. “I’ll unpack my sleeping bag on the floor.”

“We can share, darling,” Vex says, but just looking at the old bed, she can tell it’s not built for much more than one person, with some extra space. Melanie de Rolo, apparently, savored her privacy. “We both know you hate sleeping on the floor.”

“This is technically my house now,” he says. “Let me be a good host. Take the bed.”

Vex isn’t happy about it, but she relents to take it, pulling off the top blanket for Percy to use. Functionally, she knows the mattress and blankets having been changed since the last owners died, but she still pulls up her sleeping bag and lays it on top of the blankets, crawling inside of it and curling small and quiet within. She waits for sleep to come minutes at a time, finding herself right on the cusp of falling asleep before blinking awake again, listening for the hooting of an owl outside, or the murmur of the wind.

The house creaks and settles. It has been a long time since people have slept within it, and it acclimates uneasily, a building out of practice with being a home.

After a time, maybe ninety minutes, maybe longer, Vex hears someone start to wheeze and cough in a voice she doesn’t recognize. It’s Percival, of course, since, whoever else could it be, but, chalk it up to tired mind or strange acoustics, but Vex doesn’t recognize him at first. When she does, she gets out of bed slowly, like creeping around a sleeping animal, and watches without disturbing for a moment. He’s lying on his back on the floor, having pushed and claws his way halfway out of the sleeping bag, and one hand still lies sickled on his chest, fingers bent an awkward way. He’s still panting, unaware of her, in short, stitled breaths, like there’s something pressing him down.

Vex hesitates to wake him up for a minute, watching the room, and the camera. Then, she kneels down next to him and shakes him by the shoulder, trying to be both gentle and stiff enough to wake him.

Percy jolts to consciousness, cringing away at being touched as though doused with water.

“Hey,” she says.

He stalls to answer. “Vex?” he says, his voice hoarse.

“Yeah. Do you mind making a little room for me?”

He still looks confused, but he tucks back into his sleeping bag, and moves a little to the side, for Vex to drag hers closer to his. She maintains a safe distance, for her sake as much as his, and brings the rest of the blankets over, arranging them into a loose nest.

They lay in the dark for a short while without saying anything. Trinket is curled up near the doorway, and she can hear him snoring, but other than that, it’s just them and this prolonged, swallowing silence, the feeling of judgemental eyes just behind their shoulders. Vex tucks in around herself again, covering all soft spots she can reach to protect and hide away.

“Vex,” Percy says again. “Is everything alright?”

“You sounded like you were choking,” she responds. “I wanted to check if you were still breathing.”

“Oh,” he says.

“How about you? Are you alright?”

He says, “I didn’t recognize you at first. I thought you were someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Something else.”

She hears him shuffling around in the covers, looking for his phone to check the hour. When he brings it up, the light of it reveals the lower half of his face, and it’s a relief to look at him in detail. She can see him perfectly well, in the black-and-white of night vision, but in color, she can see him for what he is. After he puts the phone back down, he rolls a little closer to her, intentionally, close enough that she can feel his breath on her face, and this too, is a relief. Right now, Vax and Keyleth are nautical miles away from them, and they are sole, desolate islands in an inhospitable sea. Nothing is happening. Vex does not feel wanted here.

“Do you feel like -” Vex trails off, unsure of how she wanted to word it.

Percy nods. She suspects he doesn’t feel quite belonging here, either.

Vex inches closer, until her knee knocks against his and she stops. Something, three or rooms away from them, is knocking against the wall.

She isn’t entirely  _ scared,  _ and even if she was, she’s been scared on investigations before. What she feels is small and unneeded, in a way she’s very familiar with. Any large house one doesn’t belong in is like any other large house one doesn’t belong in. She wants nothing less than to get up and go find what is pacing after them, two or three rooms away.

When she starts to raise on her elbows, she hears Percy sigh, high and throaty. “Don’t go,” he says, like it’s a question.

Vex stays.

. . .

They review the tapes over breakfast, in a greasy diner, which is the closest establishment that serves food for miles around. It’s not to say that Vax and Keyleth slept  _ well  _ last night, but they slept about as well as any of them do during these investigations. Poorly, but they didn’t have any supernatural experiences, and really, that’s about as much as you can hope for in this profession.

Vax only watches the footage once, willingly, then puts the camera down for Keyleth to rerun while looking at Vex with a withdrawn expression. She can already start to piece together the cause for it before Keyleth, blushing, hands the camera over and points out the orb phenomena at the right hand corner of the screen. Vex is usually the first to dismiss orbs as lense problems, but even she’ll admit the oblong, strangely ashy figure doesn’t appear so easy to explain away. It remains for a prolonged period of time, moving faintly, but mostly staying in the same approximate space.

Which is about three feet away from where she and Percy are sleeping in the footage, her with one leg thrown over his hip, and him on his side with his head resting over her arm. It’s their most solid piece of evidence so far, and she doubts they could refrain from including it in the episode by virtue of Percy drooling on her shoulder.

They pick at their breakfast without saying anything. Vex moves her cold eggs from one side of the plate to another without making eye contact with her brother.

“Percy!” Keyleth says suddenly, not even trying to disguise the fact that she just managed to come up with an excuse to get up. “We should probably try to take more footage of the house! For promotional uses.”

“Right,” Percy says, disjointed. “We’ll take Vex’s truck, and film a couple of moving angles. Right now.”

“Right now,” Keyleth agrees, pushing up from the table and beating a hasty retreat.

Once they’re alone, Vax puts his hands together on the table, looking displeased. Most of the time, she would say he looks slightly more like their mother than she does, and herself look faintly, incrementally look more like their father, but right now, he’s all stiff-lipped disapproval, looking painfully like Syldor Vessar in the flesh.

“You’re going to have to forgive him at some point, you know,” she says.

“I certainly don’t fucking have to do that,” Vax says, sharply, and Vex refrains from flinching. Then, almost sheepishly, he plucks at the toothpicks jutting out of the dispenser near the window. “But. While he did put you in danger, and I’m never going to forgive him for that.” he sighs. “It might be high time I get used to the idea that you’re not getting rid of him any time soon.”

“I’m not.”

“I know, I know. Just…” Vax scrunches his face together painfully. He’s doing that heavy brow thing that he always does when he wants people to take pity on him. “Remember that he’s dangerous, alright, Stubby? He’s not all there, you know.”

He’s right, of course. Percy  _ can be  _ dangerous, they’ve all seen it firsthand, and he’s not all there, now more than ever. There’s gaps and holes you can see right through to the other side from, when you hold Percival de Rolo up to the light. She supposes it isn’t Vax’s fault that he’s never been able to see how she might relate to that. There’s a reason he’s the one who runs into dilapidated buildings, and she’s the one who reviews evidence, after all.

“I’m being careful, Vax.”

“Keep being careful,” he says. He tests the sharpness of a toothpick against his thumb, and avoids her eyes. “I love you, sister. Don’t go far.”

“I love you too,” she says. “And don’t you worry. I know exactly what I’m playing with.” She winks at him, and he smiles. She’s very good at playing to the camera.

. . .

They decide to film the last part of the investigation at night, at the top floor of the house. There was some arguing as to what they’ll even do up there, Percy having vehemently rejected they bring anything branded by a toy company into the house to talk to his forebears for fear of embarrassing him in front of his family. 

“If I as much as see a planchet up there, so help me Pelor,” he says, climbing ahead of Vex to catch up with Keyleth. The top floor of the house is only accessible through the staircase, which is just  _ great.  _ Vax is already up at the top with Trinket, having come up ahead of them, followed by Keyleth and Percy, recording the way up.

It’s a very long staircase, and Vex is very tired. Once Percy is out of sight, she tries to count the stairs on the way up. They’re very low rise, according to Percy, as a way to relieve some chronic aches Melanie de Rolo dealt with following a lab injury, and the effect is a little jarring. She counts up to fifty-six, fifty-seven before she realizes she can’t see the top floor, when she just did a moment ago.

She keeps climbing up, counting to eighty, then a hundred, then a hundred and fifty, seemingly to no end. The house is dark, but not so much to explain the fact that she can’t see the top floor by now, nor hear the rest of the group talking. When she turns her head, she can’t see the bottom of the stairs, either. But she can see, she thinks,  _ something. _

Very near to her, she hears something knocking against a wall. She starts to climb a little quicker, trying to ignore whatever it is she saw coming up behind her on the staircase. She counts two hundred stairs, then three hundred, taking them two at a time. Her legs start to cramp and protest, but she still can’t see the light of the top floor in the dark, and soon enough can’t see anything of the stairs at all except for the one stair ahead of her and another behind.

She must have been climbing for an hour or more before she trips on a stair that’s been improperly spaced, and lands painfully on her knee. She doesn’t make a sound there, and she doesn’t try to get up. She stays down, stays quiet, and waits.

There’s a knocking -

“Vex?”

It’s Percy’s voice. When she looks over her shoulder, she can see him, only a handful of steps up from her, looking down with a concerned look. “What are you doing down there? I thought we agreed to meet upstairs.”

Vex examines her placement. She’s still halfway up the stairs, where she started, but now she’s turned around, as though she’s been walking down the stairs, rather than up towards the top floor.

“Sorry, dear,” she says, getting up and turning to face him. He’s still handling the camera, and it must have only been a minute or two, since he hasn’t even bothered to turn it off. “I must have fallen down a couple steps.”

He looks like he wants to ask her if she’s alright, but thinks better of it. He offers her his hand on the way up, and she takes it. When he makes to move ahead of her, she holds on tighter, leaving half-circle marks in the thick part of his hand from her nails digging in.

“Sorry,” she apologizes again. Her voice is shakier than she intended it to be, coming out in pieces. “I just don’t want to be left behind out here. Stay by my side?”

“I will,” he says. They walk up the stairs at the same time, stair-by-stair, and finally, Vex can see the top of the stairs, then the top floor, which is a broad open space, illuminated only faintly by the three flashlights Vax has set up on a vanity.

He’s gesturing to the lefthand flashlight for the action camera Keyleth has pointed at him when they join up with them. “And this is is for no,” he says.

“What’s the middle one for?” Keyleth asks.

“Atmosphere. Freddie, do you have any questions you want to start us off with?”

“Sure,” Percy says, shrugging. He has to let go off Vex’s hand to point the camera at the whole scene Vax has set up, recoding as he unscrews the caps of the flashlights until they’re just barely unlit, and the faintest pressure could have them light up again. He sets them along the vanity, then takes out his butterfly knife, setting the blade against the palm of his hand.

“On camera, Vax?” Vex scolds. “Really?”

Vax shrugs, and Percy titles the lense out of frame as he makes a quick downward motion against his palm, drawing blood to bead up at the mouth of the cut. “Here you are, you fuckers,” he says, waving his palm teasingly towards the room at large, “a nice snack for you!”

Keyleth says, “Vax, be polite, we’re talking to Percy’s family.”

“We’re talking to a large, empty room,” Percy says, “with a bloodied idiot waving his hand in the middle.”

“If it’s so empty, than what’s the hold up?” Vax says. He’s trying to find scabs on Percy to pick at, very unwisely, and Vex can tell that it’s starting to work.

“Let’s think about this,” she says.

Percy does not acknowledge that. “Fine then. Let’s ask some questions: why are you still around, but my family aren’t? What’s so tragic and unfinished that I’m speaking to you and not my siblings?”

Vax, in his defense, does stop immediately on telling that things have progressed a bit too far. “Hey,” he says, putting his hands up in front of him. The flashlights are unresponsive.

“You really think I don’t want to believe in ghosts, don’t you?” Percy asks, letting go of the camera with one hand to rub at his face. “You really think I called you in here to prove to you how little I believe in the supernatural?”

When he takes his hand away, something in his face is different, more shadowed. “I would like nothing more than to believe all of this is happening because my great-great-aunt is haunting me. I’d like nothing more than to believe that it’s always been ghosts, instead of me losing my mind.”

Both the righthand and the lefthand flashlights turn on. They stay on for a brief moment, then flicker off, one after the other. Percy stares at them like he’d like to take them apart, piece by piece.

“Okay,” Keyleth says, “maybe we’ve gone a bit too far.”

Trinket, who’s up until now been quiet and good, tucked under a table, stands up and positions himself between Keyleth and Percy, growling low. Except he’s not the only one growling, because Percy has started to hiss, letting the camera drop to the floor. It occurs to Vex, then, that maybe Melanie de Rolo is not the supernatural force they were dealing with.

“What the  _ fuck?”  _ Vax shouts.

Vex, sizing up authority, plants her feet on the hardwood and yells, “Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III! You snap out of it before I come over there and make you snap out of it.”

Percy turns, achingly slow, to look over his shoulder at her. His eyes are cold and merciless, not his own, but for a brief second, there is hesitation.

It is about at that point that Trinket, being a 140 pound dog, leaps up on Percy’s front and pins him to the ground.

. . .

Putting her hands on the table, Vex says, “Carbon monoxide. We all slept in a house with carbon monoxide in it, and we got carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Vax deadpans the camera. “That,” he says, “ _ cannot  _ be how you’re justifying all of that.”

“Vax, we tested the house, there was a gas leak. The fact that we didn’t all die in our sleep is a fucking miracle. It’s carbon monoxide.”

At this point in the debriefing, he lays his head on the table and starts gently knocking his head against it. “We had to tie Percy to a chair,” he says, muffled by the wood. “You read Pelor verses over him for forty-five minutes until the paramedics arrived.”

“ _ I  _ am not immune to carbon monoxide either, Vax. You and Keyleth slept farther away from the leak than us, you weren’t as badly exposed, but we were all on edge. We were all hearing and seeing things that weren’t there.”

“The only gas I’m seeing is you  _ gaslighting  _ me.”

“You can’t see carbon monoxide, brother, it’s colorless and odorless.” Vex folds her hands together and beams brightly at the camera, signalling the sign off for the episode. “Let this episode be a reminder to you all to  _ please _ have your homes and detectors checked, especially if you suspect there might be supernatural forces at play. It might just save your life. Until next time, we’ve been your hosts!”

Vax, refusing to lift his head, says, “I hate you.”

“Stay haunted, Tal’dorei.”

Outside of the studio, Percy is idling in the passenger seat of her truck, Trinket curled up in the backseat. His right hand is still in a sling, his wrist having been thoroughly broken in the scuffle. When she slides into the driver’s seat, he smiles a little bit, still looking shaken, but steadier.

“I should thank you,” he says, “for… whatever that was.”

“No, I should thank you. Getting to spend a night in a house like that, free of charge? That is the bargain of a lifetime.”

He laughs. Then, his face falls somewhat. “That, ah. That wasn’t just carbon monoxide poisoning, was it?”

She says, “Well, it certainly didn’t  _ help, _ darling. But no, no, whatever it was, it wasn’t just a gas leak. Call me a bad paranormal investigator, but I don’t necessarily feel like finding out in detail what the other part was. Demons?”

Percy nods, “It was probably demons. Don’t tell your brother, he’ll never shut up about it.”

“Your secret is yours,” she says, “and mine, because I noticed. Please don’t wait two years to tell us about any other supernatural force you may be harboring? It’ll really save us a lot of heartache.”

“And episode researching time.”

Vex scoffs. “Much as I love you, I doubt we could run the rest of the series just about you. Eventually, people are going to demand other content, and I’m going to get jealous, having people other than me monopolize your time.”

Neither of them mentions that they haven’t started the car yet. She intends to drop him off at his house after this, which is a rather short distance away, and she isn’t quite ready for this conversation to be over.

“Well,” he says. “Hm. I love you too.”

She says, “I know.”

There’s a moment of silence where neither of them says anything. Percy begins fumbling with the ancient knobs of her radio, which is both no longer functional, and not even turned on, since she hasn’t started the car, so she imagines he’s very distracted. Eventually, he blurts out, “Did you mean it in a platonic sense, or -”

Vex’s truck is very wide, and Percy is seated close to the car door, which takes some stretching to reach, so she can’t really cut him off with a kiss as one might hope, but he recognizes the approach and quites all on his own, nice and well-behaved. It’s a chaste kiss, not especially deep, but soft, and feels right. She’d be happy just with this right now, she thinks, without needing to run headlong into anything.

When she breaks off, she only gets to retreat into the driver’s seat and reach for the keys before Percy follows, cupping her face in his one good hand and slotting their mouths together. Her hand goes to the back of his head, tangling in his hair and holding on to the fine, delicate hairs on his nape. When she deeps the kiss, running her tongue along his mouth, he shudders beautifully.

This only carries on likewise until Vex accidentally presses him back against the steering wheel and hits the horn, and Percy cracks his cast against the broken radio, Trinket jumping awake and barking in the back seat, but his apartment, thankfully, is only a short drive away from the studio, and has never shown hide nor hair of ghost or demon since its construction. Not that Vex has any interest looking for them any time soon, even if there was.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to everyone who participated in this year's perc'ahlia month!


End file.
